Put the foot down.
Jun. 28th, 2025 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hannahI received what I'm going to take as a fine compliment today: someone I'd met all of four hours earlier said I sounded like I wrote professionally for magazines and other publications, simply from how I talked.
I've decided it's up there with multiple people - completely independently, several years apart, none of them knowing each other - telling me I speak in real life the way I talk online.
I've decided it's up there with multiple people - completely independently, several years apart, none of them knowing each other - telling me I speak in real life the way I talk online.
Just one thing: 29 June 2025
Jun. 28th, 2025 06:40 pmjazzyjj posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
awesomeersIt's challenge time!
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
Another challenge
Jun. 28th, 2025 04:48 pmandersenmomSo I haven't been able to write for a while - it's really frustrating. I haven't done anything regularly since before I broke my foot. While this may have been a bad idea, I decided to go ahead and sign up for 100ships. I picked some idols I wanted to write, created all the ships I'm going to use, and now it's just a matter of putting them together with the prompts. So here's the table.
( Here's hoping it helps. )
100ships. I picked some idols I wanted to write, created all the ships I'm going to use, and now it's just a matter of putting them together with the prompts. So here's the table.( Here's hoping it helps. )
Murderbot
Jun. 28th, 2025 08:14 pmphilomythaMurderbot TV series eps 1-8
I've been intending to watch this for a while, and with RL being rather stressful lately I decided to spend some of the past few days decompressing by inhaling the whole thing. I enjoyed the books a lot, and I also loved this. It gives the sense of having been made with a lot of fun, a lot of love, and also a strong eye for putting in every possible ridiculously tropey situation they can plausibly squeeze in. It sticks to the book in broad outline, but in many ways it feels like a great fanfic version of the book: more subplots have been added, more Situations have been created for our favourite characters to experience and suffer, everything's turned up and embellished a whole lot. I strongly approve of this approach to screen adaptation.
( slightly rambling spoilery thoughts )
I've been intending to watch this for a while, and with RL being rather stressful lately I decided to spend some of the past few days decompressing by inhaling the whole thing. I enjoyed the books a lot, and I also loved this. It gives the sense of having been made with a lot of fun, a lot of love, and also a strong eye for putting in every possible ridiculously tropey situation they can plausibly squeeze in. It sticks to the book in broad outline, but in many ways it feels like a great fanfic version of the book: more subplots have been added, more Situations have been created for our favourite characters to experience and suffer, everything's turned up and embellished a whole lot. I strongly approve of this approach to screen adaptation.
( slightly rambling spoilery thoughts )
Sea Fog
Jun. 28th, 2025 01:32 pmpuddleshark posting in common_nature
I have been playing hide-and-seek with the rooks in the sea fog up on St Alhelm's Head.
( Not a glimpse of the sea )
Just One Thing (28 June 2025)
Jun. 28th, 2025 08:52 amnanila posting in awesomeersIt's challenge time!
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
Fannish50 #8: BoyNextDoor
Jun. 27th, 2025 10:31 amandersenmomBND debuted in 2023 with One and Only, a very cute song (that, now that I think about it, reminds me a lot of Boyfriend by Boyfriend, although without the twins).
( Number Eight )
( Number Eight )
Just One Thing (27 June 2025)
Jun. 27th, 2025 08:35 amnanila posting in awesomeersIt's challenge time!
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
(Apologies for missing yesterday's post!)
Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
Go!
(Apologies for missing yesterday's post!)
Work ethic.
Jun. 26th, 2025 09:31 pmhannahThe thing that's getting to me about my part time gig - more than pretty much anything else - is that I keep having to defer to my client's doctor's appointments and other such obligations. I know how hard it is to get an appointment with a specialist in a reasonable timetable, and adding in factors like her having to schedule a car because she can't use the stairs to get to the subway, it becomes exponentially more difficult to arrange, let alone attend.
It's not the deferring so much as knowing if we met at least twice a week, we could build some momentum on tackling the decades of accumulated legal paperwork and really get going.
It's not the deferring so much as knowing if we met at least twice a week, we could build some momentum on tackling the decades of accumulated legal paperwork and really get going.
gibus
Jun. 26th, 2025 08:37 amprettygoodwordgibus (GI-buhs, JEE-buhs) - n., a collapsible top-hat, an opera hat.
Thanks, WikiMedia!
Invented in the 1840s by Antoine Gibus, who by the name you might correctly guess was French. I’ve seen these in old movies but hadn’t known what to call them.
---L.
Thanks, WikiMedia!
Invented in the 1840s by Antoine Gibus, who by the name you might correctly guess was French. I’ve seen these in old movies but hadn’t known what to call them.
---L.
Mereth Aderthad Interview: Interview with Anérea and Shadow
Jun. 26th, 2025 09:14 amdaughterofshadows posting in silwritersguild
Anérea and Shadow are the featured artist and featured writer, respectively, for Zhie's Mereth Aderthad 2025 presentation, "How To Make a Star From a Tree: The Science of Telperion and Laurelin." They sat down together to chat about their work on Zhie's presentation and on Mereth Aderthad more broadly, as both are involved as volunteers for the event, and Shadow has also written a story for Maglor's presentation "Gil-galad was an Elven King: Kingship and Personhood in the last High King of the Noldor." They spoke about the appeal of light in Tolkien's world, about achieving freedom from perfectionism and imposter syndrome, and the special role that fanworks and fan communities play in so many of our lives.
Polling.
Jun. 25th, 2025 08:25 pmhannahYesterday was largely a smoothly running operation. Once things got set up, it was easy to tell people to feed the ballot into the scanner until the machine caught it and to wait a moment for the confirmation screen, and being told to wait a moment as part of the general instructions helped people do so. There was a moment someone didn't wait, didn't see he'd marked his ballot badly enough it couldn't be read, and he was thankfully barely out the door for us to get him and tell him to fill out another one.
There was another moment someone used a red privacy sheet instead of a black one, which had us worried for a moment before we found out the only major difference in the sheets is the color and any ballot inside them's good to be accepted. A few affidavit ballots got spat out, and so did some with extra marks. Sometimes a ballot needed to be fed in from the other end to get accepted by the machine, and it never mattered which side faced up.
Setting up the machine was easy, except for the part where someone needed to come and troubleshoot one of them, leaving us to open about 15 minutes behind schedule. It didn't cause a backlog or an issue, and all in all, we serviced just over 1300 people - about the same as the election last November. There were more babies and animals this time, and about the same number of children, but beyond that, the adults of all ages blurred together after a while so I can't speak to the represented demographics. Just that a little over 1300 ballots were processed by all the machines, with people showing up early and still coming in at 8:59PM.
Closing the machine was trickier because while all the steps were direct and granular, there were still moments I wanted to double check a part of the process with someone, and with everyone working on something, nobody could say "I'll be with you in two minutes, hold tight until then," which didn't help. But we got it done, and while we were out a little later than in November, with the sunlight having lasted longer and the day itself being much less stressful, it evened out.
One amusing moment came when someone tried to juggle a paper takeout bag, an iced coffee in a plastic cup, and a ballot, and I told him to put the coffee down onto the floor. Which he did. Something in how I told him to do so had one of the other poll workers laughing throughout the day.
Another amusing moment came in the last fifteen minutes of the day. Someone wanted them to work faster and I said we could glare. They looked away and said sure, and when they looked back, they jumped and cried out - because when they'd looked away, I'd pulled out a hard stare to demonstrate the kind of glaring I was talking about. I broke into laughter and they did, too, but man, what a moment to have.
One other poll worker was reading the Robert Caro books on Lyndon Johnson, which had us talking about systems of power, whether power corrupts or reveals, good research methods, and hypothetical Caro-level biographies we'd like to read. One person said Sacajawea and the LBJ reader said Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. I told him I'd want to read one on Tom Cruise, which, given it's a theoretical Caro-level biography, would talk about things like the history of cults and the rise and fall of various aspects of the American film industry to give full context the way Caro's LBJ books talks about the daily life of pre-electricity rural Texas and his Robert Moses book talks about the geology of Long Island to help the readers understand where those men were really coming from.
We also speculated on whether someone would get a 51% plurality and secure a spot directly from the ballot box. We chatted about market tonics and sourdough starters and the terroir of wheat. On occasion, one of the voters was upset about the concept of ranked choice voting, and sometimes they voted for one candidate instead of ranking anything and at least one person cast a blank ballot as a political statement. After twelve hours, I stopped saying people could take pens and stickers and simply told them to take pens and stickers. I ate lunch and dinner in a nearby park and otherwise spent most of the unpleasantly hot day in an air-conditioned building.
Overall, while parts of it could've gone better, I had a good enough time I think I'll probably be back in another few months.
There was another moment someone used a red privacy sheet instead of a black one, which had us worried for a moment before we found out the only major difference in the sheets is the color and any ballot inside them's good to be accepted. A few affidavit ballots got spat out, and so did some with extra marks. Sometimes a ballot needed to be fed in from the other end to get accepted by the machine, and it never mattered which side faced up.
Setting up the machine was easy, except for the part where someone needed to come and troubleshoot one of them, leaving us to open about 15 minutes behind schedule. It didn't cause a backlog or an issue, and all in all, we serviced just over 1300 people - about the same as the election last November. There were more babies and animals this time, and about the same number of children, but beyond that, the adults of all ages blurred together after a while so I can't speak to the represented demographics. Just that a little over 1300 ballots were processed by all the machines, with people showing up early and still coming in at 8:59PM.
Closing the machine was trickier because while all the steps were direct and granular, there were still moments I wanted to double check a part of the process with someone, and with everyone working on something, nobody could say "I'll be with you in two minutes, hold tight until then," which didn't help. But we got it done, and while we were out a little later than in November, with the sunlight having lasted longer and the day itself being much less stressful, it evened out.
One amusing moment came when someone tried to juggle a paper takeout bag, an iced coffee in a plastic cup, and a ballot, and I told him to put the coffee down onto the floor. Which he did. Something in how I told him to do so had one of the other poll workers laughing throughout the day.
Another amusing moment came in the last fifteen minutes of the day. Someone wanted them to work faster and I said we could glare. They looked away and said sure, and when they looked back, they jumped and cried out - because when they'd looked away, I'd pulled out a hard stare to demonstrate the kind of glaring I was talking about. I broke into laughter and they did, too, but man, what a moment to have.
One other poll worker was reading the Robert Caro books on Lyndon Johnson, which had us talking about systems of power, whether power corrupts or reveals, good research methods, and hypothetical Caro-level biographies we'd like to read. One person said Sacajawea and the LBJ reader said Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. I told him I'd want to read one on Tom Cruise, which, given it's a theoretical Caro-level biography, would talk about things like the history of cults and the rise and fall of various aspects of the American film industry to give full context the way Caro's LBJ books talks about the daily life of pre-electricity rural Texas and his Robert Moses book talks about the geology of Long Island to help the readers understand where those men were really coming from.
We also speculated on whether someone would get a 51% plurality and secure a spot directly from the ballot box. We chatted about market tonics and sourdough starters and the terroir of wheat. On occasion, one of the voters was upset about the concept of ranked choice voting, and sometimes they voted for one candidate instead of ranking anything and at least one person cast a blank ballot as a political statement. After twelve hours, I stopped saying people could take pens and stickers and simply told them to take pens and stickers. I ate lunch and dinner in a nearby park and otherwise spent most of the unpleasantly hot day in an air-conditioned building.
Overall, while parts of it could've gone better, I had a good enough time I think I'll probably be back in another few months.